The present disclosure broadly relates to troubleshooting office equipment and, more particularly, to providing direction to a user based on their location relative to the office equipment. A communication device can facilitate between the user-remote troubleshooter communication as well as real time location of the user to the troubleshooter.
Users of office equipment such as multifunction printers (MFP) can encounter problems that require remediation. Oftentimes repair of office equipment can include the identification of a part or system causing a particular performance issue. Generally, one or more office personnel are called to remedy the performance issue by replacement of one or more components, removal of pages from a flow path, replacement of disposable components, etc. Due to the relative complexity of most conventional office equipment, such troubleshooting and remediation can require an inordinate amount of time to remedy. Meanwhile, the office equipment in question cannot be utilized by one or more office personnel. Such down time for equipment can cause deleterious effects in productivity within an office.
Repair information is generally presented to a user via a hard copy text in the form of a booklet or appears on or proximate to the office equipment. The user utilizes the written text to follow instructions contained therein to follow known troubleshooting paths for issue remediation. Written instructions, however, do not always provide an immediate solution to a particular problem. Worse, such instructions can provide an incorrect solution based on what a user may perceive a problem to be. In some cases the user believes that a problem is caused by an issue in one area of one location in the office equipment where in fact the root cause is from a disparate location. In such instances, futile efforts can be undertaken by the user to fix such a problem.
In one example, a user can phone a call center to engage in a troubleshooting session over the phone in order to try and solve a problem remotely to avoid the cost of sending a service engineer to a user location. Remote troubleshooting, however, has shown that remote troubleshooting activity can be made more complex because of the dislocation between the device and the troubleshooting resources. Previous disclosures have addressed this issue by proposing to support troubleshooting conversation directly from a device user interface, wherein communication of a history and status of the device is communicated to a remove troubleshooter via a shared virtual representation of the device.
However, this system does not specifically support the issue that has been observed when situating instructions for the user near the device. Part of the work of the remote troubleshooter is to understand the location of the user each time in order to be able to a) understand user observations in their proper context and b) provide instructions with location information that are contextualized to the user. This issue represents a non negligible part of the troubleshooting session and can lead to strong misunderstanding between the user and the troubleshooter if not handled appropriately.
What are needed are systems and methods to provide efficient direction to address performance related issues for office equipment.